IACR News
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03 February 2020
Microsoft Research, Redmond, USA
Job PostingThe Cryptography and Privacy Research Group at Microsoft Research seeks outstanding graduate students for summer internships in Redmond in the areas of Homomorphic Encryption, Post-Quantum Cryptography, Zero-knowledge Proofs, Private Set Intersection, Privacy for ML, Blockchain-based applications, Compilers, Verifiable Computation, Oblivious RAM, Privacy-preserving systems, applied Secure Multi Party Computation, Differential Privacy, and other areas of applied cryptography.
Responsibilities: Interns put inquiry and theory into practice. Alongside fellow doctoral candidates and some of the world’s best researchers, interns learn, collaborate, and network for life. Interns not only advance their own careers, but they also contribute to exciting research and development strides. During the 12-week internship, students are paired with mentors and expected to collaborate with other interns and researchers, present findings, and contribute to the vibrant life of the community. Research internships are available in all areas of research, and are offered year-round, though they typically begin in the summer.
Qualifications In addition to the qualifications below, you’ll need submit a minimum of two reference letters for this position. After you submit your application, a request for letters may be sent to your list of references on your behalf. Note that reference letters cannot be requested until after you have submitted your application, and furthermore, that they might not be automatically requested for all candidates. You may wish to alert your letter writers in advance, so they will be ready to submit your letter.
Required Qualifications: Must be currently enrolled in a PhD program in mathematics, computer science, electrical engineering, or a related STEM field.
Preferred Qualifications: Demonstrated ability to engage in research. Must be able to collaborate effectively with other researchers and product development teams. Excellent interpersonal skills, cross-group, and cross-cultural collaboration. Ability to think unconventionally to derive creative and innovative solutions.
Closing date for applications:
Contact: Please apply through https://careers.microsoft.com/us/en/job/724755/Research-Intern-Cryptography-and-Privacy-Research?utm_campaign=google_jobs_apply&utm_source=google_jobs_apply&utm_medium=organic
More information: https://careers.microsoft.com/us/en/job/724755/Research-Intern-Cryptography-and-Privacy-Research?utm_campaign=google_job
Microsoft Research, Redmond, USA
Job PostingThe Cryptography and Privacy Research Group at Microsoft Research seeks researchers working on cutting-edge cryptography techniques and their applications, specifically in the areas of Homomorphic Encryption, Post-Quantum Cryptography, Compilers, Verifiable Computation, Oblivious RAM, Zero-knowledge Proofs, Private Set Intersection, Privacy for Machine Learning and AI, Adversarial Machine Learning, Blockchain-based applications, Privacy-preserving systems, Applied Secure Multi Party Computation, Differential Privacy, and other areas of applied cryptography.
Qualifications Required: A Ph.D. degree in mathematics, computer science, electrical engineering or other related fields. Preferred: Demonstrated ability to develop original research agendas. Must be able to collaborate effectively with other researchers and product development teams. Excellent interpersonal skills, cross-group, and cross-cultural collaboration. As part of your application please upload: A current CV; An academic research statement (approximately 2-4 pages) that outlines both your research achievements and agenda, and your service and outreach activities and plans; 3 letters of recommendation. This role is not to exceed 2 years.
Microsoft is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to age, ancestry, color, family or medical care leave, gender identity or expression, genetic information, marital status, medical condition, national origin, physical or mental disability, political affiliation, protected veteran status, race, religion, sex (including pregnancy), sexual orientation, or any other characteristic protected by applicable laws, regulations and ordinances. We also consider qualified applicants regardless of criminal histories, consistent with legal requirements. If you need assistance and/or a reasonable accommodation due to a disability during the application or the recruiting process, please send a request via the Accommodation request form. Benefits/perks listed below may vary depending on the nature of your employment with Microsoft and the country wh
Closing date for applications:
Contact: Please apply online through https://careers.microsoft.com/students/us/en/job/732256/Post-Doc-Researcher-Cryptography-Privacy
Tampere University
Job PostingThe Network and Information Security Group is currently looking for up to 2 motivated and talented researchers (Postdoctoral Researchers) to contribute to research projects related to applied cryptography, security and privacy. The successful candidates will be working on the following topics (but not limited to):
- Searchable Encryption and data structures enabling efficient search operations on encrypted data;
- Restricting the type of access given when granting access to search over one's data;
- Processing of encrypted data in outsourced and untrusted environments;
- Applying encrypted search techniques to SGX environments;
- Revocable Attribute-Based Encryption schemes and their application to cloud services;
- Functional Encryption;
- Privacy-Preserving Analytics;
- IoT Security.
Programming skills is a must.
The positions are strongly research-focused. Activities include conducting both theoretical and applied research, design of secure and/or privacy-preserving protocols, software development and validation, reading and writing scientific articles, presentation of the research results at seminars and conferences in Finland and abroad, acquiring (or assisting in acquiring) further funding.
Closing date for applications:
Contact: Antonis Michalas antonios.michalas (at) tuni.fi
Information Security Group, Royal Holloway, University of London, UK
Job PostingClosing date for applications:
Contact: Martin Albrecht
More information: https://jobs.royalholloway.ac.uk/vacancy.aspx?ref=0120-023
Lund University (Sweden)
Job PostingApplicants are expected to hold a MSc degree or equivalent, have a solid background in mathematics and/or theoretical computer science. Knowledge of cryptographic primitives and formal security definitions is preferable, but not mandatory. All students wishing to do a PhD degree in secure cryptographic protocols are invited to apply for this position.
Closing date for applications:
Contact: For more details or to apply to the call use the link https://lu.varbi.com/en/what:job/jobID:311518/
30 January 2020
Award
We welcome nominations for the 2020 award (for papers published in 2005) until Feb 15, 2020. The proceedings of these conferences can be found here: To submit your nomination please use the following nomination form.
More information about the IACR Test-of-Time awards can be found in iacr.org/testoftime/
The 2020 Selection Committee:
- Tatsuaki Okamoto (chair)
- Ueli Maurer
- Anne Canteaut (Eurocrypt 2020 program co-chair)
- Daniele Micciancio (Crypto 2020 program co-chair)
- Shiho Morai (Asiacrypt 2020 program co-chair)
28 January 2020
Ben Nassi, Dudi Nassi, Raz Ben-Netanel, Yisroel Mirsky, Oleg Drokin, Yuval Elovici
ePrint ReportGuilhem Castagnos, Dario Catalano, Fabien Laguillaumie, Federico Savasta, Ida Tucker
ePrint ReportWeikeng Chen, Raluca Ada Popa
ePrint ReportMetal is the first file-sharing system that hides such metadata from malicious users and that has a latency of only a few seconds. The core of Metal consists of a new two-server multi-user oblivious RAM (ORAM) scheme, which is secure against malicious users, a metadata-hiding access control protocol, and a capability sharing protocol. Compared with the state-of-the-art malicious-user file-sharing scheme PIR-MCORAM (Maffei et al.'17), which does not hide user identities, Metal hides the user identities and is 500x faster (in terms of amortized latency) or 10^5x faster (in terms of worst-case latency).
Anand Aiyer, Xiao Liang, Nilu Nalini, Omkant Pandey
ePrint ReportRosen and Shelat first considered such possibility, and constructed a cZK protocol that adjusts its round-complexity based on existing network conditions. While they provide experimental evidence for its average-case performance, no provable guarantees are known.
In general, a proper framework for studying and understanding the average-case schedules for cZK is missing. We present the first theoretical framework for performing such average-case studies. Our framework models the network as a stochastic process where a new session is opened with probability $p$ or an existing session receives the next message with probability $1-p$; the existing session can be chosen either in a first-in-first-out (FIFO) or last-in-first-out (LIFO) order. These two orders are fundamental and serve as good upper and lower bounds for other simple variations.
We also develop methods for establishing provable average-case bounds for cZK in these models. The bounds in these models turn out to be intimately connected to various properties of one-dimensional random walks that reflect at the origin. Consequently, we establish new and tight asymptotic bounds for such random walks, including: expected rate of return-to-origin, changes of direction, and concentration of ``positive'' movements. These results may be of independent interest.
Our analysis shows that the Rosen-Shelat protocol is highly sensitive to even moderate network conditions, resulting in a large fraction of non-optimal sessions. We construct a more robust protocol by generalizing the ``footer-free'' condition of Rosen-Shelat which leads to significant improvements for both FIFO and LIFO models.
Justin Drake, Ariel Gabizon
ePrint ReportWe also present a second scheme where the proof consists of two group elements and the verifier complexity is better than previously known batched verification methods for [KZG].
Benny Applebaum, Amos Beimel, Oded Nir, Naty Peter
ePrint ReportIn this paper we improve the exponent of general secret-sharing down to $0.637$. For the special case of linear secret-sharing schemes, we get an exponent of $0.762$ (compared to $0.942$ of Applebaum et al.).
As our main building block, we introduce a new \emph{robust} variant of conditional disclosure of secrets (robust CDS) that achieves unconditional security even under limited form of re-usability. We show that the problem of general secret-sharing reduces to robust CDS with sub-exponential overhead and derive our main result by implementing robust CDS with a non-trivial exponent. The latter construction follows by presenting a general immunization procedure that turns standard CDS into a robust CDS.
San Antonio, United States, 9 August - 11 August 2020
Event CalendarSubmission deadline: 1 May 2020
Notification: 22 June 2020
Lyngby , Denmark, 28 July 2020
Event CalendarSubmission deadline: 17 February 2020
Notification: 23 March 2020
27 January 2020
University of Lyon, CNRS, Saint-Etienne, France - Laboratoire Hubert Curien
Job PostingClosing date for applications:
Contact: To apply please send to Prof. L. Bossuet your detailed CV (with publication list), motivation for applying (1 page) and names of at least two people who can provide reference letters (e-mail).
More information: https://laboratoirehubertcurien.univ-st-etienne.fr/en/teams/secure-embedded-systems-hardware-architectures.html.
26 January 2020
Eman Salem Alashwali, Pawel Szalachowski, Andrew Martin
ePrint ReportKentaro Tamura, Yutaka Shikano
ePrint ReportThomas Häner, Samuel Jaques, Michael Naehrig, Martin Roetteler, Mathias Soeken
ePrint ReportCharbel Saliba, Laura Luzzi, Cong Ling
ePrint ReportRishiraj Bhattacharyya
ePrint Report- We prove memory-tight reductions for different variants of Fujisaki-Okamoto Transformation. We analyze the modular transformations introduced by Hofheinz, H\"{o}vermanns and Kiltz (TCC 2017). In addition to the constructions involving implicit rejection, we present a memory-tight reduction for the IND-CCA security of the transformation ${\mbox{QFO}_m^\perp}$. Our techniques can withstand correctness-errors, and applicable to several lattice-based KEM candidates.